Good Mourning (17 page)

Mr. Roberts fell into the second camp. He looked to be in his eighties and was wearing a full suit—which was formal for someone just coming in to do some preplanning. I didn't know all of the specifics, like what his wife's condition was, but I knew by looking at him that he was in pain.

“I was told you could help me, Elizabeth,” he said in a soft voice. I'd never known either of my grandfathers, but he had that look about him that said he would have been the type to take his grandkids out for ice cream, even before ­dinner. There was something so kind about his demeanor, which made me feel even worse about what he was going through.

“Yes, please, take a seat,” I told him. “I'm so sorry to hear about your wife.”

And then Mr. Roberts surprised me. He shook his head. “Don't be sorry,” he said to me. “You don't grieve a good life. And she had a good life.
We
had a good life.”

It was a philosophy that was almost Buddhist and resonated with me completely. Yes, he was sad that his wife was dying . . . but it wasn't a loss. They were married for sixty years, he went on to tell me, and loved each other through all of them. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from tearing up as he described his wife, whom he referred to as “my girl,” and how he would be happy for
her
when she didn't have to live in a failing body anymore. As he continued talking, I got the sense that his wife was perhaps in her last days, even hours. A day earlier, a priest had come to the house, he said, to perform last rites.

I asked him just a few questions: how many people might attend, her favorite flower, if they had any children or grandchildren who might want to do something as a special tribute during the service. Then I told him to go home to her. “We'll take care of all of this, and when you give me a call, we'll have everything ready,” I told him, squeezing his hand.

The call came four hours later. As fate would have it, Mr. Roberts “got a feeling” on his walk home from Crawford and picked up the pace. He walked into the door of the bedroom where his wife was resting—the same bedroom they had shared for almost their entire life together, he later told me—and rushed to her side. They looked at each other
one last time before she closed her eyes for good. When I heard the story, I felt a sense of pride. Mr. Roberts had come to Crawford to calmly plan his wife's funeral before she died. He was able to focus completely on her in her final moments, which is exactly how it should be. That was why I was at Crawford in the first place, and it felt good to leave work knowing I'd done my job right. Still, I couldn't help but think,
What if I hadn't been the one to pick up the phone?

TEN

Foreign Diplomacy

I
f there were one golden rule of funeral planning, it would be this: do not lose the body. You can fuck up pretty much anything else, but just like there is no murder without a body, there is no funeral without a body. It's kind of the main event.

You know where this is going. I lost a body. Not just
any
body, but an African ambassador who had been working at the United Nations. He was a VIP in the political world, but he was also the husband of my mother's friend. And he was gone. Because of me.

Crawford had a deal with the UN that whenever a foreign dignitary died, the body would be brought to us, where an embalmer would prep it or the body would be cremated, and then we'd ship it to the home country of the deceased. I had seen Tony work on several of these cases before. After
Bill worked his magic, the body was placed in a casket and then a wooden shipping container. Before we sealed the container, a representative from whichever country the person hailed from would come to make sure that nothing that was supposed to be in the casket was missing and that there weren't any items enclosed that weren't supposed to be there. The differences in how representatives from around the world handled this task was almost like a cartoon. The Italian representative who came once was all, “Hey! Looks great! Send him off!” while a Russian representative took a much more serious approach. The guy was wearing one of those fur caps that are flat on the top and have flaps over the ears—it wasn't even that cold outside—and had a stiff expression. He
obsessed
over the casket, checking out every detail of the body and that it was laid out just right with the proper clothing and who even knows what else. It was almost thirty minutes before he finally stepped back, nodded, and supervised the container being loaded into a hearse. I was surprised he didn't inspect the vehicle, too.

I had just finished sipping my Dean & DeLuca latte in the back room when I got word that the body of the ambassador was being brought in. The death had been sudden—heart attack—and so Bill was waiting for someone from the family or the UN to arrive and drop off clothes to dress the body in. I was curious about who, exactly, Mr. Ambassador was, and so I walked into Tony's office to see if I could read the folder.

“Oh gosh,” I said, looking at the name. “I think my mother knows this family.” I vaguely recognized it from my mom's building. There wasn't a ton of social interaction between residents, but pleasant “hello's” and “nice to meet you's” were standard.

Tony explained that we needed to arrange to ship the body to Africa that day, since the family had planned the funeral for just two days later. There were no direct flights, so the plan was to fly the ambassador to Paris, where the body would need to be escorted off the plane and someone from the UN would need to walk with it to make sure it was properly transferred to
another
plane, which would take it to Africa. (I won't name the specific country, to protect the identity of the ambassador.) I made it my absolute
mission
to see that this body got there safely. There were a lot of politics involved—and a lot of precautions.
Don't write “UN” anywhere on the container, or someone might steal it.
(This actually happens, especially in less-than-stable countries where thieves can ransom a dead body.)
Make sure there's someone at each layover to oversee the movement of the box. Check how much the casket weighs; if it's too heavy, it won't be able to go on the smaller plane for the last leg of the trip.
I checked all the boxes—double-checked them, even—and started mentally designing my superhero funeral-planner costume.

The morning went as it was supposed to: Bill did his
usual embalming and prep work, someone from the UN came to check things out and give us the go-ahead to ship, and the body was brought to the airport and loaded on a plane as cargo. (This is totally normal—chances are, you've flown on a plane with a corpse next to your luggage. Luckily, dead people aren't fussy travelers.) The rest of the day was normal—a little slow, even. I got a call in the morning saying the body had successfully made it on the plane and was en route, and with that out of the way, I spent much of the afternoon searching for the perfect gourmet chocolates from La Maison du Chocolat to serve at a funeral for a woman who had had a deep affection for fine wine and rich sweets.

I was about to leave for the day when my cell phone rang. It was my mom, which wouldn't have been weird except she rarely called me during the day when I was working. “Elizabeth,” she said in a no-nonsense tone. “I just got a call from my neighbor two floors down. She said her husband—he's an ambassador, have you seen him before?—was brought to Crawford. She was supposed to get a call when the body landed in Paris, but there hasn't been a call. They don't know where the body is, and the family is waiting. I told her my daughter works at Crawford and that you can help.”

I saw my night of relaxing with a bottle of Sancerre vanishing before my eyes. “Well, I'm sure the body isn't, like,
missing
,” I said, praying that I could resolve the problem
quickly. I was exhausted, and the last thing I needed was more work drama, let alone work drama that involved my mom. “Let me see what the deal is.”

Tony wasn't in his office, so I walked down to reception to find him standing next to Monica, yelling at the phone.

“Everything okay here?” I said.

“We're trying to call the fucking airline in Paris and the phone won't connect or something,” said Tony, turning red.

It hardly seemed possible that the phone was personally refusing to connect to Paris. “Well, are you dialing the country code first?” I said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Monica.

I sighed. “You have to dial zero-thirty-three before the number,” I said.

Monica dialed again, and after what must have been a full minute of rings, someone from the airline finally picked up. “I have no clue what this guy is saying,” said Monica, frustrated.

“He's speaking French,” I said. “Here, give me the phone.”

I may not have known what Monica had been saying about me in Spanish all that time, but I was the only person on staff who knew how to speak any French. I asked the airline representative if she could pass me to someone higher up on the food chain, and after another ten minutes of waiting, I eventually got to the night-shift manager, who had absolutely no idea where the body was.

And that's when I started to panic.

By the time nine p.m. rolled around, I had put calls in to the UN and the security staff at Charles de Gaulle Airport. I even Googled language nuances that I never learned in French class to make sure. Was there a difference between how you say “a body” and “a
dead
body”? Turns out, yes; a body is a “
corps
” and a corpse is a “
cadavre
.” A missing
corps
could mean a man was wandering the airport, lost. A missing
cadavre
was a code-red emergency . . . especially when said
cadavre
was a foreign dignitary.

Mom started texting me:
DO YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION? THE FAMILY IS WAITING AT THE AIRPORT IN AFRICA AND THERE'S NO INFORMATION COMING IN. PLEASE HELP. I TOLD THEM YOU COULD FIX THIS.

Oh, no pressure
, I thought, putting my phone back in my pocket. In addition to finding the missing ambassador, I also had to deal with Mom, who had finally found a reason to care about my job. It was frustrating that the first time she was taking a sincere interest in my life at Crawford was when one of
her
acquaintances needed a hand, but that didn't change the fact that this was my chance to prove to my mom that my funeral gig wasn't silly or beneath me—when an ambassador dies, you want to have someone you can call who you
know
can take care of things. And ta-da! That person was me.

“What's the update?” said Tony. It was looking to be a late night for both of us.

“I'm calling everywhere I can,” I said. “But it's late, it's not an easy time to get people on the phone.”

“It's only nine!” said Tony.

Is this my life? This is my life
. “Um, well, it's nine
here
, but it's three in the morning in Paris,” I said.

Tony told me to keep calling, and so I did, trying to stay calm on the outside while my mind went straight-up frantic. I needed to get it right. “Think, Lizzie,” I said, pacing around my office. I thought of the layout of Charles de Gaulle Airport; I had rushed through it dozens of times on quick trips to Paris or on stopovers to other countries.
Where could a body be hiding?

I finally connected to the relative who was supposed to meet the body in Paris to fly with it to Africa, where the rest of the ambassador's family was waiting (and starting to freak out). The only problem? He had zero information. He didn't even know for sure if the body was still in Paris, or the flight number for the plane that was
supposed
to take His Excellency to Africa.

I will figure this out
, I told myself, taking a deep breath. When the ambassador's son called saying that the small plane his father should have been on had landed, and they were all at the airport wondering what the hell was going on, I knew I had to stay calm. If he sensed I didn't have the situation under control, he would (understandably) feel more and more uneasy. I'd visited Tanzania and South Africa, and even in well-developed areas, there could be a lot of corrup
tion and random shit going on. I remembered landing in Johannesburg and handing my bags to two gentlemen wearing badges that said “airport security” on them. My driver jumped in between us and grabbed the bags back, telling me that those men didn't actually work at the airport—they were there to steal foreigners' luggage. All of the locals knew this like it was no big thing, and I wondered,
Well then why the hell doesn't someone kick them out of the airport?
Every country had its own limits on what it was willing to put up with, I guess. That, or they had bigger fish to fry than protecting my suitcases from a bunch of crooks.

By eleven p.m., I realized I might have to take this to the government level. There was a real chance the body wasn't so much
lost
as it was stolen, in which case, I was going to have some major answering to do, not just to Tony, but to my mom. I had done everything I could to make sure the ambassador arrived safely; it just wasn't enough. Now, from across the Atlantic, I was supposed to clean up the mess.

Most of the lights were out at Crawford, with Tony and I working from our separate offices. He didn't speak French, so he couldn't make any calls—but he also refused to leave without knowing that the situation was taken care of. “We can't afford to fuck this up,” he said, scratching his head in my doorway. “If people hear about this, we could lose business. We can't lose any business.”

“I promise that I'm working on it,” I said, annoyed that
Tony was talking money when someone's loved one had gone missing.

As shifts at the airport changed, I finally called and got transferred to an airline representative who knew what he was talking about. He personally worked with security to confirm that the casket hadn't arrived in time on the other flight, but it was safe in storage at the airport and would be loaded onto another plane to where the family was waiting. Hearing that everything was going to be okay made me want to cross the ocean myself and throw my arms around him in gratitude.

Since the ambassador was from a relatively remote area, there weren't regularly scheduled flights, the way you can just hop on a plane to London pretty much any minute of the day. Maybe,
maybe
one plane went out there a day—and that wasn't a guarantee. But my new best friend at the airline said that it was no big deal, they were scheduling another flight and would be loading the ambassador shortly.

The first person I called was the ambassador's son, who I knew would be relieved. “The body is on its way,” I said, super grateful that I wasn't instead calling him to say, “Oh hey, yeah, I have no clue. Best of luck!” He thanked me profusely, finally sounding calm. Due to the time difference, the funeral was scheduled for just twelve hours later at this point, and the flight would eat up at least half of that—and that's not counting loading and taxiing time.

Then I called my mom, even though it was the wee hours of the morning. My hands shook as I pulled up her
name in my contacts list. Part of it was the caffeine—I had been up for twenty hours, fueled mostly by coffee. (I'd even gotten desperate enough to drink the crap they kept in the back room, along with the powdered creamer.) But it was also adrenaline. I had done it. I had lost the body—but more importantly, I found it. Problem solved.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, trying to sound businessy, like I was talking to a client. “I wanted to let you know that the ambassador's body is en route and the family has been notified.”

“That's great news, Elizabeth,” Mom said in a groggy voice, like she hadn't been sleeping either. I waited for more, wanting to hear her say that I had done a good job and she could see it all clearly now—why I was good at this, how it wasn't so crazy after all. But she didn't say anything else.

“So I guess you can call your neighbor, or whatever,” I said. I felt defeated, like it would never be enough.

Just as I was about to hang up the phone, Mom said, “Who would have thought all those years of French would pay off for more than just ordering at La Grenouille?”

I tried my best to laugh. I knew she was trying—but why couldn't she just tell me that she was proud of me, that I had done well?